Crews worked through the night to make repairs to a power pole structure and re-connect the downed high voltage transmission line that caused last night's outage. All service is back to normal, with grid communities being served by hydro from our Whitehorse and Aishihik hydro plants.
A couple of questions have come out of last night's outage that we would like to address:
1. How often are the transmission lines and poles checked?
We do annual aerial inspections (using a helicopter) of all our lines and poles. Any problems with the structures are identified and repaired. We recently inspected our Mayo to Dawson line and will fly our transmission system between Whitehorse and Aishihik, and Whitehorse and Faro/Ross River next week. This schedule was set even before last night's outage.
2. How did a rumour get started that the dam was breaking?
We are not certain, although we have been told someone riding a bicycle in the Riverdale area noticed that we were spilling water and thought there was a breach in the dam. We want Yukoners to understand that during a power outage, once the first things we must do is start spilling water though the spill gates at our dam. That's because the water can't go through our turbines if they are not turning, and so we must spill it through our gates or the water would end up going over the top of our dam. That's obviously not something we want to have happen. Spilling water is standard operating procedure and we didn't do anything different in this regard during last night's outage than for any other outage.
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